Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

                 

     Food seems to taste better to me when eaten outdoors, and I did my share of that the summer I worked for the Forest Service.  On that job, our crew of four typically spent a week at a time improving trails in the backcountry.  Our foreman, Clyde Smith, would start our work day at 6 am so as leave time for an hour of two of fishing before preparing our trailside dinner.  For me, an ideal job.  Clyde typically picked up our groceries in the nearest town every 10 days, but one day asked two of us do that shopping instead.  On our return, he was upset with us for not getting the specified Best Foods brand of sandwich spread.  In fact he complained about the brand we had bought at every lunch until able to resupply his brand during the next food run.  Having heard our fill of complaints, we were interested to see if he could really tell the difference.  So that night we opened the jar of Best Foods spread and scooped out the top few inches, setting it aside and refilling the jar with spread from the other brand.  The next morning we made sure Clyde was watching us make the lunches.  That morning seemed to drag on forever, but noontime finally arrived.  We let Clyde take a couple of bites of his sandwich before asking him how it was.  He was a little suspicious, but remembered seeing us make those sandwiches from the Best Foods jar, so answered, “This is more like it, really good!”  We had him, and it felt great.  After our laughter subsided, we told him what we had done.  All he could say was, “Well, I was really hungry today.”

     Later that summer our crew was called away from work to help fight a fire that was out of control on a nearby mountainside.  At first there were a few hundred people fighting that fire, including lumberjacks and prisoners, but after gaining control over it, only a few of us remained to do the “mopping up” work.  Eventually I was the last person left on the fire.  Although I knew that revealed a trust in me, I felt bad that I was not back working with my own crew.  Instead, I was camping out on the flat ground that had recently served as the base camp for all the fire fighters.  Each day I would walk up through the entire burned out slope putting out the few smokes that had popped up overnight then check again as I walked back down to camp.   

     A nearby campground had been reopened so one afternoon I walked over to chat with the family camping there.  It was good to have someone to talk to.  They told me the yellow jackets were so bad it was difficult to get food to the mouth without one landing on it.  Remembering something I had read, I asked if they had a fish in camp.  When they gave me one, I skinned and hung it from a branch with a pan of water placed a few inches below.  Within the first minute a yellow jacket landed on the exposed flesh and ate until it dropped into the water.  It made its way to the side of the dish and flew right back to the fish to keep eating.  When it dropped the second time, it drowned.  I learned later that a little detergent in that water would have kept that bug from flying even once.  But even so, by the afternoon’s end three trout were eaten clear to the bone and over a hundred yellow jackets drowned.

     Happy to be rid of the yellow-jacket problem, those campers invited me to join them for dinner, far and away the best meal I had eaten all summer.  That night I didn’t mind being separated from my work crew.  Nothing like a good outdoor meal to brighten my perspective.